Birch Cottage has a new website of its own

Visit the Birch Cottage website to book

Welcome to Lackan Cottage Farm

We’re Steve and Claire Golemboski-Byrne, we live here off grid with our daughter, our dog, cats and horses. We make all our own energy using wind and solar, grow as much of our own food as we can (it varies widely) and have used permaculture design principles to help us create a great place to live.
Here on the website you’ll find stories about the projects we’ve undertaken – what works, what doesn’t. You can come stay in our guest cottage – Birch Cottage and we will show you round, or maybe you just want to find out how to do some of this stuff. Either way, welcome.

A covered fire pit area with decorative lighting

Happy New Year

Well - what a year. So much has happened, and is all here in our blog, but looking back you wonder how it all fitted in. A year ago we were all set to move to Wales, hadn't even seen Lackan Cottage Farm, and of course there were only two of us. 2012 began by finishing...

Yet more compost toilet stuff

Composting toilets can be expensive things if you choose to buy the fancy all-in-one devices. Most aren't much more than a seperator seat to keep the pee and solids apart, with some sort of fan to dry the solids a bit, and keep any smells to a minimum. Usually pee is...

Midwinter celebrations

At last midwinter is here, and we marked the solstice with a fire, shared with friends. The seemingly relentless rain stopped falling just long enough for us to enjoy the night and reflect on the turning of the seasons, of which we are more acutely aware, living the...

Our new facebook page

We love to share our goings on with others, so as well as this blog, we now have a proper Lackan Cottage Farm facebook page too.  Making connections and exchanging ideas is something we love to do, so now there are even more opportunities to do so. These reindeer...

Brr…

The last couple of weeks have also been a bit on the chilly side, with sharp night time frosts, and early  fog. Outside pipes and taps have frozen, and digging the ground has become a challenge. It looks lovely though.. We had some amazing frost patterns on the...